by M. J. Rose
“You don’t think I had anything to do with the robbery, do you?” Josh was astonished.
“Of course not. But knowing how tortured you’ve been, if you believed that the stones would free you from your nightmares, I could imagine stealing them might be a solution.”
“Well, I had nothing to do with it.”
“How did you know where the tomb was that morning?”
Did Malachai doubt him, too? The police had. But they couldn’t find any evidence that tied him to the crime. That’s what Tatti had been looking for while Josh had been in jail. One shred of proof. For an insane second Josh wondered if, during those early morning hours when he’d wandered around Rome in a trance, he’d gone into a psychotic state and arranged for the robbery—or, worse, gotten hold of a gun and committed the crime himself. Maybe he only imagined being in the tunnel, imagined watching the guard shooting the professor. If he could hallucinate the sequences in ancient Rome down to tasting the water and smelling the air, could he go into a fugue state and commit a heinous crime? Had his mind twisted on itself? Had his desperate desire to find answers pushed him over the thread-thin line that separated the psychopath from the sane?
He wanted to go back to his office and start making phone calls and find Gabriella. He barely knew her; the urge to talk to her and check on her wasn’t reasonable, but it was authentic.
As he stood up he knocked his shin on the bronze ormolu dragon-shape foot of Malachai’s desk’s leg.
“Damn that beast,” he said as the pain momentarily discomforted him.
“What did you say?” Malachai asked pointedly.
“I hit my shin on the corner of the desk. It’s nothing.”
“No, you said something when you hit your foot, would you mind repeating it?”
“I don’t know what…” Josh thought for a second. “Oh, yeah. Odd phrase. God knows where I picked it up. Damn that beast.”
While Malachai’s face remained unruffled, his voice belied his astonishment. “The dragon ornamentation on the left lower leg of the desk sticks out an inch farther than the one on the right and lines up precisely with most people’s shinbone. In the past century it was a family tradition of sorts to say Damn that beast if you got whacked.”
“Great. Another bizarre coincidence. My life is just full of them.”
“No, Josh. You know by now there aren’t any coincidences in reincarnation. Everything is part of a greater plan.”
“I’m trying to remember that.”
“This hasn’t been easy for either of us, has it? We both want the stones so very badly. I wonder which of us wants them more—you, because you think they will help you figure out a past you can’t understand, or me, because I believe they’ll help me prove a present I’m the only one who understands.”
Malachai never discussed himself except cryptically. While Josh had learned some of the man’s past from being around him and Beryl for four months, he still only knew the most basic things. His parents had a child before him who had died at a young age. Malachai was born two years after the little boy’s death. From what Josh had gleaned, his father had never gotten over the death of his elder son.
Growing up in Manhattan, Malachai had gone to the Horace Mann School until the tenth grade, when he moved to London with his socialite mother after his parents divorced. He returned to America years later in 1980 with a degree of Doctor of Clinical Psychology from the University of Oxford and went to work with his aunt at the Phoenix Foundation. Never married, he was often linked to different women in the gossip columns—usually wealthy daughters or second wives of successful businessmen. Malachai’s mother had died; his father was still alive and healthy at eighty-seven, but he was estranged from his son.
Everyone had ghosts.
“I need to get back to my office and find Gabriella. I need to know what happened to her and if she’s all right.”
“I know what happened.”
“You do? Is she all right?”
“Yes. She’s back in New Haven. She left Rome of her own accord, just as we guessed.”
Josh sat back down. “So Detective Tatti was playing with us when he suggested she was missing. What a little bastard. Have you talked to her? Do you know why she took off so suddenly?”
“Right after you left on Thursday night, she got a call that the professor’s condition had worsened. While she was at the hospital, her apartment was burgled. That’s what all those policemen were doing there the next morning. Frightened, she decided it wasn’t safe to stay in Rome and decided to come home, but it appears the trouble followed her back. Her office at Yale was burgled Saturday.”
“Was she hurt?”
“No, she’s fine. At least physically. She’s frightened, though. I think we should go up there and talk to her. Gabriella knows more than anyone alive about those stones. Her scholarship might help us find them.”
“Do you know who she or the professor discussed them with besides you and Beryl?”
Malachai shook his head. “Very few people. All of them trustworthy. A curator at the Metropolitan Museum. One at the British Museum. The heads of the archeology departments at both their universities. Neither she nor Rudolfo wanted to go public until they knew what they really had. Neither of them wanted a media circus. They were right.”
“But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other people who found out. Workers at the site could have overheard conversations, or caught a glimpse of what was in the box and guessed. Gabriella’s or the professor’s cars or apartments could have been bugged. There are a hundred ways that the information could have leaked, despite their being careful.”
“You’re right, of course.” Malachai twisted the gold cuff links he always wore. They were ovals engraved with the same design as in the bas-relief on the front door—phoenix birds, each with a sword in its right talon.
“How much money do you think the stones are worth?” Josh asked.
Malachai picked up a deck of cards and shuffled them. Shuffled them again. They made a smacking sound like water hitting the shore.
“It might not have anything to do with money. Not if someone inside the Catholic Church is behind the robbery.”
“And do you think that’s possible?”
“You saw the nuns and priests protesting at the site,” Malachai said as he shuffled the deck again. “Wicca, witchcraft, pagan religions, reincarnation. Each one chips away at the omnipotence of the Church at a time when they can’t afford it. No, they wouldn’t want the stones to surface—not to mention do their magic. If it was the Church, we’ll never find them and they’ll never be for sale.”
“Do you think that’s what happened?”
“I don’t know, but I’m determined to find out. You think I’d admit defeat this easily? After all these years? When we were so close? Absolutely not. We’ve simply moved arenas. The stones were stolen—either for someone in the Church, or for a specific collector, or to sell on the black market. I’ve already put the word out that we’re willing to pay for any information that leads to an answer. Rest assured, if the stones are for sale, I’ll pay the price. Give up? Not yet. Not ever if I can help it. I want those stones.”
He shuffled the deck yet again. “That’s why we need to see Gabriella. She can help us. Can you call her and find out when she’s free? We can take a drive up to Yale tonight or tomorrow. Just get on her calendar. Make it clear that we can help each other a tremendous amount….”
“You spoke to her—why didn’t you ask her yourself?”
“She was with her little girl and didn’t want to stay on the phone. Besides, I think she’d be more receptive to you asking.”
“Why?”
“I’m not the one who thinks she’s might be my long-lost inamorata.”
“Neither am I. There were no memory darts, nothing that would lead me to think she is.” Although, he thought but didn’t say, he had wished it.
“Really? Nothing? I thought I sensed a bond, a spark.”
“How much are you prepared to pay for the stones?” Josh changed the subject.
Malachai put the cards down on the leather-topped desk, fanned them out and said, “Pick one.”
Josh went to reach for one, then changed his mind and chose another.
“Five million,” Malachai said before Josh turned it over.
When he did, the card was the five of diamonds.
Chapter 42
Josh’s insanity, or whatever it was, didn’t wait for an invitation. Nor did it care that it was unwanted. Being at its mercy left him in a state of low-level anxiety. Knowing that at any time, for reasons he didn’t understand and had no control over, he might be zapped by a lurch, kept him on edge. There was no warning, just as there was no way to cut a lurch short, or bring one on. He hoped Malachai was right, but he had his doubts. That, plus jet lag, exacerbated his state of mind that morning. He didn’t want to sit in the foundation and wait; he wanted to see Gabriella right away and find out about the burglary in Rome and the one in New Haven, find out if she was really okay. But when he called, he still got a recording.
Just before ten, he felt a migraine coming on and swallowed two pills that were supposed to stave off the brutal headache. He rubbed his temples. It was quiet in his office—too quiet. Before his head injury he always had music playing. Jazz singers, old-fashioned crooners he’d heard growing up or driving rock. What had been keen appreciation had in the past sixteen months turned into a necessity. Silence exacerbated the lurches.
He pulled out a pair of headphones he kept close, but he was too late. The jasmine-and-sandalwood scent that precipitated an episode was in the air. He was spiraling down toward flickering candlelight. Pleasure and excitement bubbled up inside him.
And then fear. The present disappeared and he slipped back more than a hundred years into the past.
Women in low-cut gowns and men in tails mingled, chatting and sipping cups of punch or flutes of champagne that a white-gloved waiter was handing out. Old-fashioned music edged into his mind. There was a long table against the wall being used for a buffet of delicacies: pyramids of oysters, bowls of glistening caviar, dishes of olives, platters of roasted meat and fowl.
Percy Talmage refused the champagne, asked the waiter to bring him a glass of port, and made his way through the room, listening to snippets of frivolous conversation and gossip. Only his uncle Davenport, who stood in a corner with Stephen Cavendish, appeared to be having a serious discussion. Inching closer, Percy was careful not to draw attention to himself. He’d learned the art of being invisible and was quite good at spying on his uncle. A few years before, he never could have imagined he’d be capable of the deceptions he now practiced daily. The hidden passages his father had the architects build into the house for his own amusement had become as familiar to Percy as his own bedroom, and the magic arts he and his father had studied as a diversion were now invaluable tools. It had been all the rage to play parlor tricks, and his father had delighted in them. How surprised he’d be to learn about the way Percy was using them now. His breath caught in his throat. He still missed his father even though it had been eight years since he’d died, but this wasn’t the time for grief. The dossier of evidence he was building was growing fat. He didn’t understand what was going on, but he knew that he was getting close, just another few pieces to the puzzle and then he would be able to—
“How on earth do you think a nineteen-year-old girl is going to protect our investment, Davenport? I expected more from you than this,” Cavendish growled.
“Don’t make the mistake of underestimating my plan. In its simplicity is its genius.”
“It’s not a plan, it’s a folly. Blackie is a dangerous man.”
“But he’s also a man with one particular weakness, and that’s what I’m taking advantage of.”
“Does your wife know you’ve thrown her daughter to the wolves—or, in this case, wolf—on our behalf?”
Davenport leaned forward and murmured a response that Percy couldn’t hear, but the lurid laughter that followed chilled him.
They were discussing Percy’s younger sister. Esme had left for Europe several weeks before to study painting in Rome for six months with a private instructor. Along with the teacher, Davenport had arranged a villa and a chaperone—in the guise of his elderly spinster sister. He’d even reassured their mother that Titus Blackwell, who would be in Rome supervising the club’s archaeological dig at the same time, would look out for her.
What did this new piece of information mean? How did it fit in with everything else Percy had learned? When the answer came to him he felt stupid. Why hadn’t he connected Blackwell’s presence in Rome with his sister’s trip before now? He had seen the financier talking to Esme at parties, but everyone talked to Esme. She was vivacious and funny. Yes, she flirted, but it was innocent. Wasn’t it? Esme couldn’t be involved with Titus. With a married man.
But the expression on Davenport’s face had suggested something else.
Could Esme be in love with Titus?
Was that what the cryptic comments in her letter referred to? She certainly was happy in Rome, and she had always been an iconoclast.
Percy backed away from the conversation. He would get his sister home even if it meant going to Rome himself. This was one too many travesties in a string of betrayals that Davenport had brought upon his own brother’s family, his legacy and his home.
As a young man, Trevor Talmage had founded the Phoenix Club in 1847 along with Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Fredrick Law Olmstead and other well-known transcendentalists. But their original mission—the search for knowledge and enlightenment—had been abandoned in favor of a single-minded quest for power and wealth when, after Trevor’s death, Percy’s uncle Davenport had usurped everything, including his brother’s marriage bed.
And now he was using his niece and had embroiled her in his treacherous plans.
What kind of danger was she in?
Percy sipped the port that had once been his father’s drink of choice. Now he was the only man in the house to touch the amber bottles imported from Spain. Uncle Davenport had laughed at his nephew’s choice of drink, asking him how he could ingest that sweet syrup. That was fine with Percy; it pleased him that his uncle would never touch the reserved stock. This particular shipment had been exceptional and there were at least three bottles left.
Another sip. And then a stab of pain. The sickening twist in his stomach he’d had several times in the past few days. Sweat broke out on his forehead. He needed to lie down, in his own bedroom, away from the crowd and the music.
On his way out of the ballroom, Percy saw his uncle watching him with dark, sparkling eyes. Examining him. He must see that Percy was ill; surely, he could tell that from where he stood. But he wasn’t making an effort to come to his aid.
And then Percy doubled over with pain.
When he opened his eyes, he found he was in his bed; his teeth chattering, his forehead burning and his stomach cramping in pain so intense he was whimpering like a dog.
His mother, her skin so pale she looked as if she’d been sculpted from marble, sat beside him, wiping his face with a damp towel, ignoring the tears that were coursing down her own cheeks.
Percy fought against the spasms, trying to form words. If only he could catch his breath and get a reprieve from the attack long enough to tell his mother what he’d discovered.
“Davenport, he’s trying to talk,” his mother said to his uncle. The man’s hand came down to rest on her shoulder; Percy saw bony fingers and a gleaming wedding band.
“Poor, poor boy,” he said.
She was leaning down, her face only inches from his.
“What is it, Percy?”
He tried to speak, but all that escaped was an agonized moan. His eyes shut against the unbearable cramps.
“He’s getting worse. We’re losing him.”
Percy forced open his eyes—at least he could warn her with a look—but it wasn’t his
mother’s face he saw. It was his uncle’s, peering down at him, his steel eyes glittering with victory.
“Mother…” he managed.
She bent over him again, pressing a cool, cool cloth to his forehead. She was crying.
“Josh?”
He reached up to touch his mother’s cheek. To wipe away her tears.
“Josh?”
Like a stretched rubber band snapping back to its original shape, Josh rebounded. But for a few seconds he was overwhelmed with pathos, watching his mother’s pain.
No. Not his mother. Percy’s mother.
“Are you all right?” Frances asked. She stood in the doorway to his office with a takeout bag from the deli up the street. “I brought you some breakfast,” she said, smiling. She knew he never remembered to pick anything up for himself and had taken to getting him whatever she got for herself.
He focused on her, tried to clear his head. It was all a riddle inside of an enigma, and he was at its center. Lost.
Chapter 43
New York City—Monday, 10:50 a.m.
The rash of articles in the news regarding the opening of the Vestal Virgin’s tomb, the shooting, the two murders and the theft of ancient artifacts had apparently triggered trans-life episodes in men and women all over the world. People who’d never experienced anything like them before were having odd, disturbing hallucinations and looking for someone to talk to. Because the Phoenix Foundation and Josh Ryder were mentioned by name in the articles—no thanks to Charlie Billings—there was a steady stream of calls from early that morning that continued into the afternoon.
Fielding requests from adults who wanted help with apparent past-life memories was part of Josh’s responsibility. He’d explain what Malachai had first explained to him when he’d shown up: the foundation has a longstanding policy not to work with adults. They were simply a research facility that documents childhood cases of past-life experiences. Adults, Dr. Beryl Talmage felt, had too many years of stored visual imagery that could have been processed and confused with memories. And then Josh offered the names of counselors who could help with meditation techniques to control the callers’ episodes.
